Good afternoon. I'm going to go ahead and get started here with the next presentation make sure we keep on schedule.
My name is Lisa Sedlar. I work in an area of the library called the National Information Center on Health Services
Research and Health Care Technology also known as NICHSR and one of our information products is the Partners in
Information Access for the Public Health Workforce. And I'm going to a little bit about that website and about some
of the features we have in that website today.
On the National Library of Medicine homepage, which I'm sure you're all very familiar with, we were very excited when health services research and public health made it to the front page. Its always
a good thing. So you can get to all of our resources from the homepage by clicking on that link Which brings you to this
page. And we have our health services research information products on the left hand side, left column the public
health on the right and as all of you know there kind of a gray area in between what really belongs where a lot of them
overlap quite a bit.
The Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce portal is right under public health
collaberative projects. Clicking on that brings you to the homepage of what we call partners the partners website. This is
basically what it looks like. We are adding and changing a few things here and there but basically this is what you'll
see when you come to the website. I'm going to tell you just a really brief history of partners. If anyone's more interested in
some of the history you can go to the about partners site and find out some more about that kind of the history where it
came from, what started the whole process for getting partners to work together. Partners is basically twelve organizations
government and nonprofit that deal with public health. And these are a listing of the partners in alphabetical order here.
I want to talk about some of the features of the website now. One of the most heavily used areas of the partners website
is a project we call the Healthy People 2010 Information Access Project. If you're not familiar with healthy people 2010 and
if you're interested in that you can go here about it. Briefly, it's a lot of health goals that the public health
service has put forth and basically they set forth what is the measurement currently in 2000 and where we want
it to be in 2010. So this there giving the public health force, workforce ten years to try to meet and standard goal. So
NLM thought, "well how can we help," and the public health foundation worked together to kind of come up with an
information project that would help public health work, the public health workforce be able to meet those goals.
And, as all of you know, PubMed is a wonderful tool. Wonderful to be able to search all those, all the medical literature there.
But it's also very hard to use unless you use it everyday and really know the ins and outs of how to make that work well
for you. You're just overwhelmed. You can get tens of thousands, tens of thousands easily of citations and the
public health workforce aren't really used to working necessarily with things tools like PubMed and that so they kind of
need a quick and easy way to get to the information they want without having to spend a lot time learning how these
things work. So the National Library of Medicine, the Public Health Foundation and some medical libarians from across the
country got together and what we did was we worked with members of the healthy people 2010 working group and selected
some of the objectives. For the healthy people 2010 project there are twenty eight major focus areas and these are
the first, they're in alphabetical order here, these are the first few ones here. And within each focus area there are
other specific objectives and those objectives again have the standard with what should be met, what it, what they are now
and what they hope it will become.
I'm going to show you just one thing here and what we did was select certain, certain objectives and then we worked with librarians and the healthy people 2010 working group. And had the librarians develop
what's commonly known as a canned PubMed search. Basically it's a search where the search strategy is stored but the
search results are not static. So everytime you click on the PubMed icon you will get the search strategy put in for you
and you will get the most recent results from PubMed. The one of the things I want to show you is about food safety. And if
you click on any one of these focus areas you'll be taken to a page like this. You can link to the complete healthy
people 2010 chapter if your interested in the background information that went into the chapter. There are PubMed search
icons here on the left hand side of the page if you click on that, that is what we'll put in the search strategy which
will then take you to the PubMed search results. The objective is what's there after the PubMed search icon. I just picked
the first one here if you hit the PubMed search icon, it'll take you to this canned search and if you want, if you're
interested in the search strategy you can go in and edit it and put in some things, change the years, add or take away terms
that you may or may not want. And as you can see fifty eight results from the PubMed search is pretty good. Now again no
search is perfect so there may be a few things you need to weed out here but basically it really helps narrow PubMed to
something that's useful for the public health workforce.
Another really and useful tool that we've found on the website is this public health information and data. There's both a training manual and a tutorial that's available. This is the
tutorial and if you look across the top there are four main areas Staying Informed, Health Education Resources, Health
Statistics, and Evidenced Based Public Health. These are done by different authors and all put together and made into
a web tutorial with the folks of the University of Michigan. And if you go into one of that colored tabs here, I just went
into the staying informed one here it's then breaking, broken down into an introduction, websites that address the issue
here, how to make time for that, the case study so that you can learn more about that and then some exercises. These are
all useful things to kind of help get folks into public health information and learn about that and come away with
something useful after going through the tutorial.
And this is just a screen from the case study so that you can kind of get a brief idea of what it is. Basically it gives you a problem and something that is real life problem that someone
could have encountered through in their public health work.
Next one of the newer things that's on the public, partners website is the public health topics. One of the things we did when we worked with the public health foundation was we
did a small scale focus group with the healthy people 2010 and basically what we found out is that folks really don't
want to go into kind of the we have the information here organized by main topic kind of by type of information
like health promotion, health education or literature and guidelines. Folks didn't want to go have to got into each
of those different kind of main topic areas if they wanted a bunch of different information about bioterrorism, about aging
and elderly care or about HIV/AIDS. So we, we're starting to kind of repackage the information along with some additional
information by topic area. We currently have three topics; bioterrorism, environmental health and HIV/AIDS.
Here's the
environmental health website and basically for each of the topics here you'll have different kind of organizational areas.
So you can see here for environmental health or children's environmental health, hazardous substances, air, water, toxicology
literature.
We also have data tools and statistics, education and training; some are the same as the main topics on the
homepage. And then on the bioterrorism page again these main topics going to be a little different because it's a different
subject it has different main focus areas. And these are the main topics that are currenlty on the page. This is kind of
where we started with information and how we kind of categorized it. So this is interesting and useful if this is you
know what you need to find. So you can go into if you know that
you need to get some training for your staff in a certain area you can come to the education and training page. If you're
interested in grants and funding you want to see if you can if there's any grant money out there for a project someone in
public health workforce is looking to do you can come here and look for that information.
And just to give you kind of taste
of what's on some of the main topic pages, the education and training page here we do have a link to the public health
information and data tutorial and training manual. We have TRAIN which is a database that is produced by the public health
foundation. They have a wonderful listing of training opportunities for the public health workforce.
And we also have
distance learning programs that are available from the accredited schools of public health. It was a project that was funded
through the partners and ASPH to kind of make that, make their distance learning site more accessible, more easier to use
and much more user friendly.
On the literature and guidelines page the public health administration section of the Medical
Library Association has just fairly recently put together their core public health journals project. We have that on here as
well.
Another thing that we do, try to do very well is keep up with meetings and conferences that are coming up. Public
health is everywhere and anywhere and there are lot of things going on. So we do have upcoming meetings. We do
have a different category for webcasts, we have a calendar of events and we also do keep links to the past meeting and
archives reports if those are available for a particular meeting. The health data tools and statistics, again these are
a little different we have national public health data sets, state and local when they're available, public health
infrastructure data, other tools and tools for data collection and planning.
And if you go into the other tools you'll get
to one of our other products which is the health services and sciences research resources and from there you can get a
listing of public health systems research that is available.
Another thing that we do is every week we add new links to the
website as well as news and news can be a new meeting, a new publication, a new study that's been released and the latest
news is always on the homepage. And if you're interested we do have a weekly push email that goes out that has a list of
all the new news items that have been added as well as the new links that have been added to the website. And we hope very
very shortly to be able to offer an RSS feed for this information as well for those of you who are interested in that
technology that will be coming very shortly. And this is a slightly cut off email of what the push email looks like. Has a
link to the first one is a discussion of email lists which is talking about the radiation events medical management listserv
which was just talked about earlier today and probably have another presentation again tomorrow.
Literature and guidelines
the National Network of Public Health Institutes newsletter. So you can see kind of there's a nice mix of things that are
sent out every week here. So it's a nice way to keep up to date on kind of what's new, what's out there and what's going on.
And lastly one of the things that we also do is we look to the public health workforce and anyone else in information
resources. If you do know of a great link that's not on the website or you don't know if it's on the website, please
suggest it. We do have a means for feedback; we appreciate any and all information. We also have later down on the page here
on the same page under suggest a link, there's a way to contact us if you have any information about the website, any
comments, criticisms, suggestions we're always open to hearing what the public health workforce needs and we appreciate
hearing from anyone that can help us. I appreciate your time. And I'm not sure where Janet is. Sorry. Oh I can take any
questions if anyone has any questions. [end]